While this may be technically true, the reality is that when you take $10 billion from a company there are strings attached. Consultation on a decision of this magnitude is one of those strings. You can choose to push ahead anyway after this is done but dropping the news on them 1 minute before you pull the trigger is unacceptable and MSFT will go for the throat here. You can't be seen to be a company that can be treated like this at MSFT level when you have invested this much money in any org.
Did they take a wire transfer for $10bn in cash, now sitting in their bank account? Or did they get a promise of various funding over N years, subject to milestones, conditions, in a variety of media including cash, Azure credits, loan lines etc.
I'd imagine the latter, and that it can be easily yanked away.
You mean the latter, but yeah. Financing like that is doled out based on a number of things; it would be wildly irresponsible to do otherwise for reasons exactly like this.
No, that's not it; relationships play gigantic roles in large deals.
Besides, even if you had an outstanding contract for $10bn, a judge would not pull a "well technically, you did say <X> even though that's absurd, so they get all the money and you get nothing."
Depends what you mean. Legally they might be in the clear but guarantee when you fuck around with billions of other people's money, it gets more complicated that that.
There are lots of other people and companies with $10 billion though. Why does it have to be Microsoft? Even after this circus, Open AI could still probably raise a ton of money from new entities if they wanted to. Maybe that is the point of this.
